New-Tech Europe Magazine | February 2018

“IoT technology is catching up with our visionary dream” The advance of IoT: from smart gadgets to optimized office buildings John Baekelmans, IMEC

A strong match: pairing up hard- and software Today, affordable technology exists to detect people’s presence in a room, but not their exact number, their activity, or their exact loca-tion. In 2017, our teams demonstrated radar-based classification of various human movements, as well as remote respiration and heart beat detection. Today, these measurements still require body-worn devices, but our radar-based technology can now be integrated in the environment and perform these measurements at multiple me-ters of distance. That has never been shown before and holds big promises. This technology enables accurate analysis of presence, movement and life signs, while – unlike current camera-based solu-tions – preserving privacy.

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises us a more comfortable, con-venient and safer life. A life with devices, appliances and even build- ings that adapt to our needs. At the moment, IoT technology is mainly gaining ground in the consumer market – with people’s smartphones serving as user-friendly interfaces for services such as smart lighting, home monitoring, smart CO2/ smoke detectors, smart heating and ventilation, voice command assistants, etc. But the IoT’s potential goes far beyond these clever home gadgets; as the technology matures, a myriad of new possibilities are opening up. An important step – in addition to experimenting with consumer- focused IoT applications for smart homes – is creating smarter office

buildings, i.e. buildings that do not only offer the highest level of comfort, but also the best energy-efficiency and safety. Using IoT technology to track how a building is used, we can design offices tailored to our exact needs, without superfluous meeting rooms, or without air-conditioning that is on when no one is in the room. Equipped with the next generation of IoT sensors and radars, buildings will be able to tell how many people are in a room, where they are and what kind of (working) circumstances (temperature, illumination, etc.) they prefer. As buildings account for 40% of a city’s electricity consumption, installing IoT capabilities will signifi-cantly contribute to achieving the global electricity reduction goals.

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